The Wedding Night by Harriet Walker (story reading txt) 📕

something gentle—meaningful but instinctive, homely. Not so much a quest for spirituality as the search for someone to share a bag of crisps with.

“A big one or a small, though?” he joked. “Not enough crisps for two people in a small one, and I’m looking for a woman who understands that.”

I laughed and gazed at the lights spread around us. Other skyscrapers, like trees in a forest, emerged from the night as if on a heat map, their outlines invisible but for the red lights they were dotted with to warn planes of their hulking presence in the dark. The river wound sluggishly off in the distance, under a suspension bridge beneath which traditional wooden boats passed, garnished with blinking fairy lights. Despite the breadth of the view and the fact of all that humanity below, the air remained so still and so silent as to convince me that the two of us were alone up there.

“I’ve never been anywhere like this,” I told him. “I grew up in the countryside. In a wold.”

The word “wold” became raucously funny for some reason—the champagne and the cocktails, I suppose, but also the great breath of relief we had both exhaled at having found each other.

“God, there isn’t much out there on those apps, is there?” I giggled sadly. “One of the other guys on there had listed ‘eating’ as a hobby.”

He mimed strangling himself and twinkled at me. “That’s exactly why I messaged you, actually,” he said, serious now. “I’ve been on a few terrible dates in my time, but I saw your picture and I thought, ‘This woman—no, this goddess—aspires to more in life than simply digesting.’ ”

This time I laughed so hard I thought I would fall out of the sky.

My plane was now leaving in seven hours, and I planned to spend all of them with him.

22. Effie

Invigorated by his swim, Charlie offered to cook dinner.

As Effie counted out cutlery from the drawer, she watched beneath her eyelashes as he shook the vinaigrette into life from where it had settled in its glass bottle. Iso had presumably assured him that nothing had gone on with Steve—could Charlie say the same to her?

Effie knew that her own doubts would subside if she didn’t prod any further—just like the oil trickling down the insides of the stoppered bottle in Charlie’s hand, eventually coalescing once more at the bottom into something manageable, before settling and lying tidily, undisturbed. Where they would pose no problem to her and Ben.

The others ferried bowls of fresh salad and baskets of bread to the table outside. It and eight metal chairs were the sole occupants of the patio now that the wedding guests’ folding seats had been removed. Charlie himself carried the large plate of barbecue-tender duck breasts across the terrace from the grill, with no small amount of ceremony. He was one of those men who took pride in the fact that he could cook, not because it was a life skill but because it was an all too rare accomplishment among most of the well-to-do, hands-off men of his acquaintance.

Effie knew he prized it like an eccentricity, a quirk of nature, unaware that there were other men—men like Steve, for example—who cooked regularly and without pomp. Admittedly also with less red meat and fewer esoteric glazes, less swagger, far fewer utensils, and an altogether less intensive load for whoever would wash up in their wake, but with the laudable aim of feeding their families and their loved ones, rather than simply to show off their place in the modern gendersphere.

She understood that cooking gave Charlie a sense of himself: skilled, modern, a catch. Tonight, it had helped him shrug off the greasy coating of self-loathing his hangover had left him with. The sun had melted some of it, and the pool had rinsed off yet more. His performance in the kitchen had been cleansing, and the wine currently tinkling into a glass—“Why not?” he had asked with a shrug when Lizzie had suggested opening a bottle. “We’re on holiday!”—had been a rebirth of sorts.

“Charlie’s so amazing in the kitchen,” Iso purred as he set the dish down in front of them.

The nervous, shivering man Effie had encountered in that very room nine hours earlier had been replaced by the usual Charlie, smooth and self-confident. Even Steve and Anna seemed more relaxed; they had tended a salad, side by side, at one of the thick marble worktops in the kitchen, and the efficiency of the production line they formed spoke volumes even though they had exchanged no words.

As Effie set the table with Ben, she laid some of her inner turmoil to rest, regulated her feelings and breath with napkins and cutlery. When they had finished, Ben coaxed her to walk the perimeter of the grounds with him, stopping to kiss her as they took in the view across the valley from the pool.

“It’s surprisingly hard to get you on your own with all this lot around,” he said as they stood entwined and silhouetted against the beginnings of sunset in front of them. He threw a glance at the house and waved back to Lizzie where she stood, alone, on the terrace, looking out at the horizon too. She didn’t return his salute.

When they reached the table, the sight of yet another sweating green bottle sheathed in cooling chrome raised Effie’s pulse briefly. Her mouth dried and her stomach flipped at the thought of consuming anything from within it. She’d have no trouble turning down a drink this evening—her first day without alcohol in she didn’t know how long. Quite when she had come to rely on it so much was yet another thing she couldn’t remember; but it was something she and Ben had rather bonded over this past month, a shared hobby.

Is binge-drinking a hobby? Remembering Bertie’s abstemiousness, Effie flinched at the knowledge that she’d drunk as much the night before as most people